Holiday originating from superstition banned in Jordan for not being superstitious enough

The Middle Eastern country of Jordan has banned Halloween due to Muslim fundamentalists who claim that the holiday is “Satanic” and “homosexual.”

The spokesperson for the Ministry of Interior, Ziad Al Zoubi, confirmed to press the decision to ban celebrations of the holiday. He said that they were forced to announce the ban to the public after several groups attempted to secure permission for Halloween parties—even after the last two years of Muslim extremists starting riots in Amman, the capital of Jordan, in protest of similar events.

In 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood said on its website that they had trashed several Halloween parties, even setting fire to a café, because the events were “a challenge to the values of the Jordanian people and their Arab and Muslim identity, as well as a violation of religious laws.”

Of course, Islam is hardly the only major world religion with members that object to the holiday; as progressive as the Catholic Church has been lately, one priest (who had literally just exited a conference for practicing exorcists) recently told the UK’s Daily Telegraph that Halloween is “a subterranean world based on the occult.”

Presumably, he forgot about the parts of Halloween that originated with the Catholic holiday of All-Hallows…

According to History.com, “In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.”

And the origin of wearing costumes on Samhain? As the site Enlighten Me explains, “Celts believed that, during this period, the boundary between this world and the next was very thin and that spirits could pass through the living world and wreak havoc on people. To scare away evil spirits and prevent them from entering homes, the Celts dressed up in costumes and wore scary masks, since they believed this would trick the spirits and keep them from knowing people’s identities.”

As to why the LGBT community is being associated with Halloween, it might just be our love of an excuse to cut loose, dress however we want, and have fun—or, it might be the general extremist, paranoid conflation of THE GAYS with the occult.

If it’s the latter, those religious extremists that see the devil in everything are going about Halloween all wrong. Anyone who’s afraid of where THE GAYS’ influence is going, and acknowledges October 31 as our day, needn’t bother trying to shut our holiday celebrations down—as many have noted, nothing can stop us now.

Instead, if LGBT people are the modern-day boogieman, those who fear being converted to the side of “perversion” should just try to blend in on Halloween—dress up in some form of “gay apparel” (wrong holiday?), enjoy some seasonal treats, even attend a party.

After all, the worst that could happen is that they would enjoy themselves.

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